A Christmas Chrestomathy

As the year draws to a close, the editors are delighted to present our second annual Christmas Chrestomathy, highlighting the essays that best represent our aims, ambitions, attitudes, and even our animadversions. As it turned out, 2021 was a milestone year for the journal with the launch of a new website, the switch to a rolling publication schedule, and the debut of a new section: The Rambler. Collected below are some notable essays we published this year, some illuminating exchanges from our letters section, and a selection of our favorite links from The Rambler.

To our fond familiar readers: Thank you. To readers in prospect wishing to know what Inference is all about: Start here.

→ Download PDF version (76pp., 4.1MB)

New essays will begin appearing once again at the start of January. To receive email notifications about new publications, please consider joining our newsletter.

• 

  Medicine

  Battlefield Medicine

  Benjamin Davido

  What happened in the AstraZeneca debacle? Physician Benjamin Davido recounts how, within a matter of days, French and European agencies, politicians, and medical professionals offered differing assessments on the efficacy and potential limitations of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The inevitable result of this mixed messaging from authorities was confusion and mistrust among the public.

• 

  Physics

  Quanta of the Third Kind

  Frank Wilczek

  Quantum mechanics is nearly one hundred years old; and yet the challenge it presents to the imagination is so great that scientists are still coming to terms with some of its most basic implications. Theoretical insights and recent experimental results in anyon physics are leading physicists to revise and expand their ideas about what quantum-mechanical particles are and how they behave.

• 

  Linguistics

  On Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

  Anna Maria Di Sciullo

  In the first essay for a new series on landmark texts, Anna Maria Di Sciullo revisits Noam Chomsky’s classic Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Published in 1965, Aspects was a revelation, presenting linguists with what, at once, became the Standard Theory. It promoted linguistics into a science, one that accepted the methods and standards of the hard sciences themselves.

• 

  Zoology

  Primate Memory

  Tetsuro Matsuzawa

  Our closest living relatives in the animal world are fascinating creatures. Chimpanzees use tools, pass on learning to their young, and in some cases exhibit far superior memory, speed, and accuracy in performing cognitive tasks than do humans. In this essay, Tetsuro Matsuzawa recounts some of the most striking aspects of his work on primates, memory, and the evolution of the human mind.

• 

  Mathematics

  At Lunch with Freeman Dyson

  William Press

  This is the story of a minor discovery in mathematical game theory by William Press and Freeman Dyson in 2011. It concerns the prisoner’s dilemma game, which, played once, involves little strategy. But consider the iterated prisoner’s dilemma (IPD) game. In the IPD, there is information in the previous plays, which each player can use to devise a superior strategy that remains self-interested.

• 

  Genetics

  The Secret Lives of DNA

  Neeraja Sankaran

  In Unravelling the Double Helix: The Lost Heroes of DNA, Gareth Williams traces the stories of scientists from the mid-nineteenth century onward as they were, in one way or another, involved in research on DNA and “were variously enthralled, seduced or infuriated” by it.

• 

  Physics

  Secrets

  Jeremy Bernstein

  Once the project to make a nuclear weapon began, secrecy became a top priority. The story of these efforts and how they evolved after the war is the subject of Alex Wellerstein’s Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States. But the book confirms what Jeremy Bernstein has long believed: the information needed to make a nuclear weapon has been in circulation for a long time.

• 

  Biology

  Reconstructing Ancestral Proteins

  Chase Nelson

  Evolutionary biochemists have suspected that ancestral proteins were more general than their modern forms, capable of binding a wider range of targets and driving a greater diversity of reactions. While Lucas Wheeler and Michael Harms initially confirmed this suspicion, their more recent work, which increases the sample size of targets from four to approximately 100,000, calls it into question.

• 

  Mathematics

  John Horton Conway: The Game of Life

  Daniel Kleitman

  The late John Horton Conway had a gift for making complicated mathematics appear simple. One piece of his work helped to solve the major problem of group theory and led mathematicians to realize that if something holds for all simple groups, it has to be true for all groups. He also contributed the concept of surreal numbers and invented popular puzzles such as the Game of Life.

• Letters to the Editors

• A Brief History of the Muon

  Sheldon Lee Glashow

  The theoretical and measured values of the muon magnetic moment anomaly have grown apart. Is this due to experimental error, or computational error, or to physics lying beyond the Standard Model?

• More Secrets

  Kenneth Ford, reply by Jeremy Bernstein

  One of the developers of the H-bomb recounts his experiences with security and keeping national secrets. His perspective? Secrets are like helium. They escape from almost any container.

• On Algorithmic Amplification

  Hany Farid

  The culprits in the plunge into delusion are not deepfakes. The real culprit is more mundane and pernicious: the algorithms that curate the information recommended by search engines and social media.

• On Modified Gravity

  Viktor Toth, reply by Jean-Pierre Luminet

  Viktor Toth adds theoretical insights to the modified theories of gravity that aimed to solve the dark matter problem without necessitating the existence of hypothetic particles of nonbaryonic matter.

• The Rambler

  Some of our favorite links posted this year.

  Follow @RAMBLER_FEED

• Different strokes: Two bipedal hominin taxa lived alongside each other in Tanzania. The footprints of one are characterized by a sloping, swiveling, gait …

  Read Article

• In 1021, a tree was felled in Newfoundland by Viking explorers constructing a hut. A millennium later, the atmospheric record retells their story …

  Read Article

• Mysterious radio waves have been detected coming from the center of the galaxy. An imperial alien civilization? Intergalactic pirate radio? …

  Read Article

• Easier to manufacture, to store, and to administer, DNA vaccines represent a new hope in the fight against COVID-19, and a host of other diseases …

  Read Article

• The tardigrade’s gait resembles that of insects 500,000 times its size—cute, but confusing. Could there be a common ancestor between them? …

  Read Article

• Our home, north of the Yukan … A butchered wooly mammoth has revealed the northernmost known human site of the Paleolithic period …

  Read Article

• A group of Neanderthals splattered red ocher pigment onto a stalagmite tower in a ritual that went on for several thousand years. Is it art? …

  Read Article

• Lightning never strikes the same place twice, but reef fishes independently evolved a mechanically fast jaw system fourteen times …

  Read Article

• Nineteen million years ago, a mysterious extinction event wiped out 90% of the shark population, along with 70% of their morphological diversity …

  Read Article

• Assuming you eat your five a day, look before you cross the road, and all else goes as good as it could, how long would your body last? …

  Read Article